WHY I WENT QUIET ON DONALD FUCKING TRUMP (A Confession From the Coalface)

It's time to fucking suck it up and dig deep for me mates.

Righto, you lot of misfits. You may have noticed something missing from IFLA lately. For a publication that's spent the better part of a year elbow-deep in the entrails of the most corrupt administration in American history, we've grown strangely quieter on the big fella. No Belly Flops. No pump-and-dump updates. The closest we've come is passing along how much Aussies, Mark Carney and an iron ore boss reckon he's dumber than a pile of pelican poop.

I owe you an explanation. Not an apology, an explanation. Because I reckon half of you are feeling exactly what I’m feeling, and nobody in this game ever has the guts to say it out loud.

So here it is. A chunk of my actual soul, served up raw as a Sunday steak that never touched the barbie.

I can’t stomach the cunt anymore.

Never thought I’d write that sentence. I’m a resilient bastard. I’ve lost a company, crawled out of a bottle, rebuilt a life from the studs up with my own two hands. I’m the happiest bloke you’ll ever meet at a barbecue, first to laugh, last to leave. And yet somewhere in the last few months, typing that man’s name started producing an actual physical response. Full-body revulsion. Like opening a forgotten Tupperware at the back of the fridge and copping the smell before the lid’s even off. That’s him now. Week-old prawn shells in the summer sun.

Covering Donald Trump around the clock is like being handcuffed to a malignant narcissist in a house fire he lit. You know the cycle. The outrage, the gaslighting, the little lull that lets you catch your breath, then the next atrocity comes screaming through the window before you’ve swept up the glass from the last one. You start flinching at push notifications like a shell-shocked meerkat. You start dreading your own filing cabinet. And the worst part, the bit that finally made me pull the pin, is you start feeling complicit in the whole rotten machine, because your attention is the diesel it runs on.

Let me paint you a picture of what this job actually looks like. It’s not just me. It’s Texas Mom, it’s Maizy, it’s a Shih Tzu Terrier named Mitzy with better news judgement than the entire Murdoch payroll. It’s my 88-year-old mum ringing me to make sure I saw a story, bless her cotton socks, because in this family even the great-grandmother generation is on the content beat. We’re scouring news breaks, leaks, court filings and financial disclosures around the clock like seagulls on a dropped chip. Most people take a polite sip from the firehose. We live with our gobs wired open underneath it.

And here’s what months of that does to a bloke. It’s not the crimes that break you. It’s the getting away with it.

A jury found him liable for sexual abuse, and the judge overseeing the case spelled it out in black and white afterwards: what that jury found was rape as any normal person understands the word. He’s a convicted felon 34 times over. The grift isn’t even wearing pants anymore: the crypto, the share trades that age suspiciously well, the plain brown envelopes dressed up as diplomacy. And what did the institutions built to stop exactly this bullshit do about it? The Republican Party rolled over like a dog begging for tummy scratches. The donors reached for the chequebook. And the highest court in the land, that fumigation-ready flophouse of hand-picked stooges, took one look at a career criminal and handed him a crown. Justice Sotomayor saw it coming and said the quiet bit in writing:

“In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.” (Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, Trump v. United States, 2024)

Sit with how far we’ve fallen, because fair dinkum, it’ll give you vertigo. Jimmy Carter sold his peanut farm to avoid the mere appearance of a conflict of interest. A peanut farm. Fox News ran roughly 4,000 segments frothing over a laptop because a president’s son sat on the board of a gas company. And now there’s a spray-tanned three-card-monte hustler running what amounts to a rolling insider-trading operation from the Resolute Desk, and the loudest sound in Washington is crickets from the gutless wonders on the Republican benches, backed by the 24-hour grievance turbine of Fox News and its cauldron of cunts in the commentariat, whose entire business model is making sure their viewers never look directly at the grift. Not journalists. Carnival spruikers in makeup, flogging outrage to pensioners between ads for reverse mortgages and pillows.

That’s the injury, right there. Not shock. Helplessness. Watching the referee pocket the whistle, join the other team, and then bill you for the privilege.

But there’s something darker underneath, and this is the bit I really need you to understand, because it’s happening to you too.

Nothing surprises me anymore. The hundredth scandal doesn’t land like the first. The daily avalanche of fuckwittery has become background hum, white noise, almost boring, and that is the single most terrifying sentence I’ve ever written. Because the boredom isn’t an accident, it’s the strategy. Steve Bannon, the unmade bed himself, told us the playbook to our faces years ago:

“Flood the zone with shit.” (Steve Bannon, 2018)

And Hannah Arendt, a woman who watched actual fascism up close and personal, warned exactly where the flood ends up:

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is that nobody believes anything any longer.” (Hannah Arendt, 1974 interview, condensed)

That’s the whole game, folks. Not to make you believe the lies. To exhaust you until you believe nothing, react to nothing, and quietly hand the arsonists the matches and a jerry can on your way to bed. Normalisation isn’t a side effect, it’s the bloody product. And when I catch myself scrolling past a story about presidential bribery with the same energy I scroll past the footy scores, I know the poison’s working on me too.

I’ll be dead honest about how ugly it gets between my ears some days. There are moments I look at the true believers, the ones cheering while their own Medicare gets fed into the woodchipper, standing in the rain at rallies for a bloke who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire, and I catch myself thinking: chuck the lot of them on one of Elon’s fucking starships and fire them at Mars, see how the rugged individualism goes without roads, hospitals or oxygen. And then I pull up, because that thought is the disease talking. That’s what this era does to you. It doesn’t just teach you to despise him. It starts teaching you to despise them, all 77 million, and the second we go there, the bastards have won twice.

So no, this is not a sympathy grab. I’m not standing here with the Akubra hat out asking you to feel sorry for a bloke who chose this beat with his eyes open. I’m telling you because I know from your emails and comments that you’re carrying the same load, just without the excuse of it being your job. Outrage fatigue is real. Moral injury is real. If you’ve gone quiet lately, if you can’t talk about the news at dinner anymore, if the push alerts make you flinch, you’re not broken and you’re not soft. You’re having the correct human response to a completely cooked situation.

Here’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, apart from Mitzy standing on my chest demanding breakfast like a furry little standover man.

November 2026. I can see the ember glowing in the tunnel, and it’s getting brighter. Midterms have a beautiful way of reminding wannabe emperors that the crown was rented, not bought. And past that, 2028, where the glimmer turns into proper daylight. History is not kind to blokes like this. The ledger always comes due. Ask the ghost of every tinpot strongman who was certain the crowd would love him forever, right up until the crowd didn’t.

And here’s my promise to you, hand on heart. IFLA is not done with Donald Trump. Not by a long shot. The filing cabinet is groaning like a ute with a wet ton of sand in the tray: the share trades, the crypto grift, the plain bribes, the charity that nicked money meant for kids with cancer, the entire festering all-you-can-eat buffet of corruption. We will publish every last course of it. But we’re doing it on our terms and our timetable, not his. Because chasing that wheezing sack of grievances around his daily outrage cycle is running on the hamster wheel he built, and this little outfit of one bloke, two sheilas and a Shih Tzu Terrier is nobody’s fucking hamster.

Rationing the poison isn’t surrender. It’s how you stay in the fight long enough to be standing there, arms crossed, watching the ending.

Thanks for coming behind the veil with me. Now do yourselves a favour: go outside, pat a dog, hug your kids, stick some snags on the barbie and log off for an hour. The avalanche will still be there when you get back.

And so will we.

IFLA ~ Gman

THE AUSSIE TO YANKIE WORD FIXER-UPPER-A

A standing feature for our American readers, who keep emailing to ask what the bloody hell half these words mean. Australian and American are technically the same language, in the way a koala and a teddy bear are technically both cuddly-looking: one will happily sit in a tree half stoned, the other won't scream at you.

Akubra The wide-brimmed felt bush hat, genuine kit on a working grazier and pure costume on a politician who needs a regional crowd to forget she flew in on a donor's plane. The headwear equivalent of a pair of RM Williams boots that has never once seen mud. When a millionaire pops one on to sell you the bush, count your fingers afterwards.

Righto The verbal clutch pedal of Australian conversation. Signals agreement, resignation, or that a bloke is about to say something you need to sit down for. “Righto, you lot” at the top of a piece is the sound of a man rolling up his sleeves, and you should read what follows in exactly that spirit.

You lot The Australian plural you, our answer to y’all, aimed at a group with a tone somewhere between affection and a warning. “Righto, you lot” is how a teacher opens class, a coach opens a spray, and a publication opens a confession. Whether you are in trouble depends entirely on the next sentence.

Coalface The literal rock wall where a miner swings the pick, and by extension the frontline of any hard, grinding, unglamorous work. “At the coalface” means where the actual labour happens, as opposed to head office, where the labour is discussed over catering. A bloke reporting from the coalface of Trump coverage is down the mine with a headlamp and a keyboard, and yes, the canary stopped singing months ago.

Bless her cotton socks Peak Australian affection for someone elderly, tiny, or trying their absolute hardest, usually a nan. Untranslatable warmth in five words. Deployed here for an 88-year-old mother who runs her own one-woman newswire in case her son, a professional news-scourer, somehow missed a story. He never has. She rings anyway. Bless her cotton socks.

Chuck To throw, in every sense we own. You chuck a snag on the barbie, chuck a sickie, chuck a u-ey, chuck a wobbly, or chuck the whole lot of them on a starship bound for Mars in a moment of weakness you’re not proud of. The most overworked verb in the language and it has never once complained.

Chequebook What you call a checkbook. Same thing, different spelling, slightly more dignified font. The rectangular paper artefact nobody under 30 has ever held. Trump still pretends to write in his.

Pull the pin To quit, stop, or call the whole thing off, from yanking the pin on a grenade, though the Australian usage means defusing your involvement rather than detonating it. You pull the pin on a job, a relationship, or a months-long habit of letting a felon live rent-free in your skull. Recommended by doctors.

Pull up To stop yourself short, mid-stride or mid-thought, like a horse refusing a jump. “I pulled up” means a bloke caught himself before doing or saying the regrettable thing, which is the entire distance between having a dark thought about starships to Mars and typing it into a post. Also what a hamstring does at the worst possible moment, and what wannabe emperors historically fail to do.

Fuckwittery The collected works and daily output of fuckwits, industrialised. Where a single act of idiocy is a mistake, fuckwittery is idiocy achieving economies of scale, an entire administration producing the stuff in bulk like a factory that never sleeps. Measured in avalanches. See also: fuckwit, the individual production unit.

Gutless wonder A coward of rare and remarkable purity, a specimen so devoid of spine that scientists should study him. The standard-issue congressional Republican, a creature that watched the presidency turn into a crime scene and responded by checking which way the donor wind was blowing. Wonder, in this usage, is sarcastic. Gutless is not.

Seagulls on a dropped chip The instant, shrieking, zero-dignity feeding frenzy that erupts around anything remotely valuable left unattended. One chip, forty birds, no survivors. Also the correct technical description of a small independent newsroom hitting a fresh court filing, or the entire White House press pool hitting a rumour. See also: dropped pie, which is the tragedy; this is what happens to it next.

Standover man Old Australian criminal slang for the enforcer who looms over you until you pay up, extortion as a physical posture. Historically a Sydney razor-gang profession, currently the job description of a Shih Tzu Terrier standing on a sleeping man’s chest at 6am demanding breakfast. Same technique, better cause. Also works for a president shaking down entire industries, though the dog has more charm and a cleaner record.

Jerry can The rugged metal or plastic fuel container, your gas can, named after the WWII German design our diggers nicked because it was better than ours. Standard equipment in every ute and the correct prop for the phrase “handing the arsonists the matches and a jerry can,” which is what an exhausted public does when it stops paying attention. Also proof that Australians will happily adopt enemy engineering if it holds 20 litres and doesn’t leak.

Tray The flat open cargo deck on the back of a ute, your truck bed, except a tray is a working surface and a bed is where Americans keep their unused gym equipment. A ute groaning with a wet ton of sand in the tray is the official unit of measurement for anything overloaded past all decency, including a filing cabinet full of unpublished Trump corruption stories.

Tinpot Cheap, flimsy, small-time, and utterly convinced of its own grandeur, from cookware knocked together out of scrap tin. A tinpot dictator is a strongman built to the same standard: shiny at the rally, dents if you breathe on him, melts under actual heat. The full lifecycle runs from balcony to courtroom, and the ledger always comes due.

Cuppa A cup of tea, and the official Australian response to every crisis on the emotional spectrum from a flat tyre to a constitutional collapse. “I’ll put the kettle on” has defused more family arguments than the United Nations has wars. If an Australian tells you to bring a cuppa to an article, clear your schedule. It is going to be a long one and somebody is going to cop it.

Do yourself a favour On paper, simple advice. In practice, the catchphrase of our legendary music guru Molly Meldrum, who spent decades telling the nation to do itself a favour and buy a record, and the nation, remarkably, obeyed. Now carries a permanent tone of warm insistence: this thing is good for you, I know best, don’t argue. When IFLA tells you to do yourself a favour and log off for an hour, that is Molly-grade sincerity. Take the advice.

Wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire The absolute rock bottom of Australian regard for another human being, contempt so total you would withhold the cheapest fluid you own during an actual emergency. There is nothing below this. It is the Mariana Trench of opinion. Reserved for the rarest of specimens, such as a man who steals from a kids’ cancer charity and then asks the people he robbed to chant his name in the rain.

Prawns Shrimp. Steve Irwin, and Paul Hogan before him, lied to you. No Australian has ever said the word shrimp in earnest, and we have been quietly pissing ourselves about that ad for 40 years.